Last week I jested that notorious garden primadonna Monty Don (oh, how I used to like watching him fight with Chris Beardshaw) was off drying out, as he was mysteriously absent and somewhat Monty-ish lines were being performed by the sumptuous Carol Klein. Looks like it's worse news than that -- he's off on gardening leave with a minor stroke, poor love. Still, maybe now they'll bring back the "three things you can do in your garden this weekend" bit (a stab of practicality in Monty's empathically expansive creative and touchy-feely gardening "approach"). Not that I ever did, but I liked the little stab of guilt when I watched it last thing on Sunday (or sometimes Monday after work) and realised that this was another weekend in which I had once again failed my garden.

In other news, the Crystal Skulls are fake! Dear Mr BBC, in what sense is it news that those notorious fakes, the crystal skulls, are fakes? I'm relying on this month's Fortean Times to remind me of the whole sordid story, but from what I recall, it went something like this (I'll try and capture the way people spoke in the past).

"Dude, check out these awesome crystal skulls, they're, like, from Atlantis or Ancient Maya or something.""They're not really, though, are they.""Heck no, Dave made them, you should get him to make you some.""Can I take some photos?""Sure!"

Does anyone else use new i-movies? I ran into this bizarre problem where it was importing things borkenly, failing to register the imports, and so on (this went on for some time before I figured out where all the ghost files had ended up and I'm still not sure I got them all). I've only got about two hours a week put aside for video, so I need things to work, damnit! I worked around by using quicktime to do an initial crop-and-convert but I still had to restart the programme a couple of times before it would show me the clip. Under old i-movies I'd be frantically junking clips to make space by now, assuming I'd run into memory issues, but new i-movies works so differently I'm not sure that's even possible.

In other news, I've been sent a DVD of my drains and a quote for clearing my filth pipe or something. And now they want to tell me what to do next, by fax. It's all just a string of ancient strangeness today.

It is kind of hard to call them fakes. They appeared without provenance so just because some people thought they came from Atlantis - sorry the Amazon basin - it doesn't mean anyone reputable believed that. What they are is interesting art - a great deal better than bouncing the signal running a grand piano off the moon - but they seem to have been misclassified as archaeology.

The trouble is that a chunk of clear quartz that big would be too pricey for merchandising. Flawed glass would be cheap enough so I expect the merchandising will either be cast glass (not too bad though not crystal) or plastic (no good for outdoors).Someone has to be hard on pretentious art and it's rather expected of engineers.

We were hypothesising that Monty had got tired of the GW thing and was in the process of backing out of the series quietly and letting others take over.

'twas a bit of a shock to hear the news but we wish him well because he's a nice if rather troubled man.

We were wondering who will come in as the new lead presenter. Chris Beardshaw was one we thought of. He has the right level of gravitas plus the obligatory twinkly eyes required for the part, and he is well thought of in the horto industry (they were always a bit sniffy about Monty because he didn't come from a professional gardening background)

Ah, but becoming a gardener is a classic downshift (and probably the animating urge of many of his audience). It's one I'd be tempted by myself should I ever become rich enough to downshift!

Having been following it myself, things have been odd this series -- Monty appeared to have Queen Bee'd his co-presenters, Carol in particular had been buried in a truly obnoxious subsection guaranteed to alienate pretty much everyone, and at the same time it had been extended to a quite exhausting hour....